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Affiliate Marketing Allows You the Freedom to Work From Home

by Rahimah Sultan

The rise of the internet has had a profound effect on all our lives, radically altering how we live and work. In our on-demand society, one of the single most important benefits has been the ability to work from any place in the world and digitally earn an income. This idea appeals to scores of people who are frustrated with the 9-to-5 life and are seeking ways to free themselves from corporate responsibility.

You can start or boost your business using the internet and various platforms. A good place to begin is with affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing allows you the freedom to work from home.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?
When you sell anything for anyone else and you receive a commission for it, you’re marketing as an affiliate. You’re independent and on your own, not just a salesperson working for that company. Although there are no limits that need to be met, the more you sell the more you earn.

You can effectively earn money by marketing for many companies at one time. There are no limitations and you don’t need to create your own products or services to earn money selling anything in this format.

Affiliate marketing isn’t easy. Unless you have a significant audience or a platform, selling anything will require a substantial investment of both your time and money. You can’t do it without traffic – someone to see your offers.

You have to get people to care about you. You have to get them emotionally invested in you before you can sell them anything. Don’t try to sell something right away, at least not until people become fully vested in you and your personal journey.

You need to create a diversified platform. If you have a blog, don’t focus solely on that. Build a Facebook Group, an online forum and other ways that you can stay connected with people.

Once you’ve built your platforms, develop and nurture your audience. Connect with them on social media channels. Respond to their emails. Engage with them in comments. Make it easy for them to reach you. You need to connect with your audience and develop that relationship over time. They need to get to know and trust you.

When you’re ready, search for the right product or company that’s relevant to your audience.

If you’ve taken the time to build an email list, you can use that opportunity to survey your subscribers. Ask them, specifically, what they’re most interested in. The answers can allow you to laser-focus your affiliate offers in the right direction.

When building an email list, you need to offer something in return. Use email providers like InfusionSoft, MailChimp, ConvertKit, Aweber, or any number of others, to send out the email to a survey. Survey Monkey is good for building your survey. Determine the best thing to offer and be sure to get clear on what your audience needs to do and what you’ll give them in exchange. It can be a free cheatsheet, a downloadable how-to ebook or some other useful item.

You then need to apply to related networks such as ClickBank, CommissionJunction, Rakuten’s LinkShare, Impact Radius, which are some of the larger affiliate networks, or numerous others.

Just know that you must submit an application to most of these networks to be accepted. Once you’re accepted in, you’re often required to apply directly to the merchant afterwards. So there are two layers or gates that you need to bypass. That’s also why it’s important to build up your platform and create that emotional bridge between yourself and your audience before attempting to promote anything to them.

Now you need to build content to promote. You can use countless mediums of which your blog is the most important. Build content that delivers massive value and that is engaging.

Every single network or merchant will provide you with specific links that you can use to promote whatever it is you want to sell. Be sure to study the details of any offer that you decide to use. Then, build out your affiliate links and ensure that the sales and clicks are registering to your account. You can use URL shorteners like Bitly or one of these to make the links more manageable in terms of length.

Affiliate marketing allows you the freedom to work from home. So be persistent and don’t give up.